Good question. I'm not sure, but I suspect it shouldn't do anything interesting; mercury allows oxygen to move through the otherwise impermeable aluminium oxide crust and "rust" the metal.
Since sapphire is already 100% aluminium oxide, but arranged in a crystal lattice I think it should be stable in contact with mercury unless the mercury disrupts the lattice (a possibility--my physical chemistry is weak).
Often data contains structural features that initially aren't observed and without them appear to support a hypothesis only weakly. By exploiting the structure, we can see things much more clearly.
An example: say we want to know how a drug affects cognition. We give a simple test to a bunch of people on and off it, blinded, etc. The control group's average score is 74, and the test group's average score is 72. We can use a t test to see if there's a statistical difference, and find there isn't. We can't conclude anything about the drug.
Now imagine we have exactly that same data, but we were careful to give two tests to each person (in a random order, and different tests, of course). We take another look at the data and find out that every single participant scored lower when they were on the drug. With even a fairly small sample size this provides strong evidence that the drug impairs cognition, and probably tells us quite a bit about how much it does.
The article is probably talking about multivariate regression; the more important number comes a few sentences later---"retention was related more strongly to manager quality than to seniority, performance, tenure, or promotions". So presumably, they did the same sort of analysis, carefully pairing people who were similar in as many ways as possible, and found out that good managers are more important than seniority in terms of employee retention. The more variables you have, the more even large differences can hide in raw group averages.
Your last sentence answers the question you pose: the new UI is attempting to train users to use the browser search bar.
A huge number of Chrome users go to google.com to search for things; if the new page looks like the Google search page, and it moves your cursor to the address bar, Google hopes these users will learn that you can just search from there. Maybe it's an experiment that will fail, but it seems like it might work.
> they could even make ad targeting work by moving their mail-reading bots to the client
Gmail ad targeting isn't a bit of JavaScript that can run in real time in the background. It's a series of huge map reduces touching data sets larger than any client computer could store. Just indexing a pre-prepared list of mothership ads would result in a horrible user experience (far poorer ad targeting).
Google has a vested interest in only showing you ads you might be interested in; it doesn't work as well as it should, but it works magnitudes better than the state of the art 10 years ago.
I can easily imagine an authority issuing a warrant to rsync.net without knowing that there is a canary in place. It seems less likely for an NSL with an attached gag order, but still possible.
Nothing in the names policy prohibits pseudonyms. If your given name is "Jason Ramirez", you're welcome to have a separate Google+ account with the name "Nancy Young".
You only have to prove people know you by a name if you want to go by "#RS", "Albert Einstein", or "GreenLife Rx"; all three of those are likely name violations for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with knowing who you are.
This would be much more interesting if it asked you about symptoms of sleep deficit. E.g., "if you go into a dark room and lie down in the middle of the day, how long will it take you to fall asleep?"
Someone who habitually sleeps 6 hours a night but never feels tired is probably fine. Someone who habitually sleeps 8 hours a night but always feels tired should try sleeping more, and if that doesn't work they should seek advice from a doctor.
I expect there is a large segment of people who suffer from sleep deficit and would be more effective if they slept more, but don't know that it would help them. I don't think this is the correct way to reach such people, or the correct message to give them.
A few kg of blueberries a day? All my food for one day together weighs less than that. Did you mean grams? That seems low, but kg/week is still way too high.
Blueberries consist mostly of water(proteins, carbs and fat make total of 7.5 grams per 100 grams, more or less rest is water), so they aren't very rich in calories(44 kcal per 100 grams). Of course all sorts of berries would rather be an supplement than a primary energy source in the first place.
But indeed, kilograms per day? Sounds too much to be optimal, and relevancy for aging or combating it from perspective of brain development is totally left out, which makes the whole claim even more astounding. Sources or gtfo! :)
It's quite easy to eat a lot of berries in one go - I can manage 454g of strawberries in a sitting, no problem - but I still think more than kilo or two of blueberries would be a tall order.
Besides, think of the cost! Here are some US prices, as best I can tell. Anywhere from $20/72oz - i.e., $9.80/kg!
How on earth can we usefully generalize from the experiences of white men born ~1918 who attended Harvard? I think longitudinal studies are massively important, and I'm all in favor of them, things like:
"Alcoholism was the main cause of divorce between the Grant Study men and their wives"
Don't really give us that much of a clue about how alcoholism (for instance) affects everyone else. I suspect it's similar; but this doesn't give us any data on anyone who isn't in a very very specific group.
This is after his first vocal cord was paralyzed, but before the second one was also damaged. You can hear what he called "a slightly weaker voice than normal which some people think sounded a little funny"--it quavers a bit. I was hoping to hear his voice before the first injury, but that was before Google was a phenomenon so there might not be any public recordings of him.
Since sapphire is already 100% aluminium oxide, but arranged in a crystal lattice I think it should be stable in contact with mercury unless the mercury disrupts the lattice (a possibility--my physical chemistry is weak).